[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I have not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my
judgment, accept a degree he cannot read.

Millard Fillmore, declining an honorary degree from Oxford (and possibly
poking fun at Andrew Jackson's acceptance of one from Harvard)

 

Under every stone lurks a politician.

Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC)

 

Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.

Frank Dane

 

If I wanted to go crazy I would do it in Washington because it would not be
noticed.

Irwin S. Cobb

 

Mothers may still want their sons to grow up to be President, but according
to a famous Gallup poll of some years ago, some 73 percent do not want them
to become politicians in the process.

John F. Kennedy

 

The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much
trouble to put makeup on two faces.

Maureen Murphy

 

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Mufti

 

This term for the off-duty civilian clothes of the military man, or these
days anybody who usually wears some sort of uniform, was originally a joke
among officers in the British Indian Army, and is first recorded early in
the nineteenth century. It's usually said to come from Mufti, the title of a
Muslim legal expert who is empowered to give rulings on religious law. The
story is told in Yule and Burnell's Hobson-Jobson of 1886 that the word was
"perhaps originally applied to the attire of dressing-gown, smoking-cap, and
slippers, which was like the Oriental dress of the Mufti". It is assumed
that officers wore this garb while relaxing in the mess.

 

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By hook or by crook

 

This curious phrase has bothered many people down the years, the result
being a succession of well-meant stories, often fervently argued, that don't
stand up for a moment on careful examination.

 

As good a place to start as any is the lighthouse at the tip of the Hook
peninsula in south-eastern Ireland, said to be the world's oldest working
lighthouse. It is at the east side of the entrance to Waterford harbour, on
the other side of which is a village and parish called Crook. One tale
claims that Oliver Cromwell proposed to invade Ireland during the English
Civil War by way of Waterford and that he asserted he would land there "by
Hook or by Crook". In another version the invasion of Ireland was the one of
1172 by Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, also known as Strongbow.

 

Two other stories associate the phrase with gentlemen called Hook and Crook.
Both appeared in early issues of the scholarly research publication Notes
and Queries. One linked it with the difficulties of establishing the exact
locations of plots of land after the great fire of London in 1666. The
anonymous writer explained:

 

The surveyors appointed to determine the rights of the various claimants
were Mr. Hook and Mr. Crook, who by the justice of their decisions gave
general satisfaction to the interested parties, and by their speedy
determination of the different claims, permitted the rebuilding of the city
to proceed without the least delay. Hence arose the saying above quoted,
usually applied to the extrication of persons or things from a difficulty.
The above anecdote was told the other evening by an old citizen upwards of
eighty, by no means of an imaginative temperament. - Notes and Queries, 15
Feb. 1851.

 

The other supposed derivation was equally poorly substantiated:

 

I have met with it somewhere, but have lost my note, that Hooke and Crooke
were two judges, who in their day decided most unconscientiously whenever
the interests of the crown were affected, and it used to be said that the
king could get anything by Hooke or by Crooke. - Notes and Queries, 26 Jan.
1850.

 

Most of these stories can be readily dismissed by looking at the linguistic
evidence, which tells us that the expression is on record from the end of
the fourteenth century, by which time it was already a set phrase with the
current meaning.

 

During this period, local people sometimes had rights by charter or custom
known as fire-bote to gather firewood from local woodlands. It was
acceptable to take dead wood from the ground or to pull down dead branches.
The latter action was carried out either with a hook or a crook, the latter
implement being a tool like a shepherd's crook or perhaps just a crooked
branch.

 

Little contemporary evidence exists for this practice. Written claims for it
dating from the seventeenth century are said to exist for the New Forest in
southern England, one of which argued for an immemorial right to go into the
king's wood to take the dead branches off the trees "with a cart, a horse, a
hook and a crook, and a sail cloth" (it's not stated why the sail cloth was
needed). Another version was once claimed to be in the records of Bodmin in
Cornwall, whereby locals were permitted by a local prior "to bear and carry
away on their backs, and in no other way, the lop, crop, hook, crook, and
bagwood in the prior's wood of Dunmeer." Richard Polwhele's Civil and
Military History of Cornwall of 1806 argued in support of this claim that
images of the hook and the crook were carved on the medieval Prior's Cross
in nearby Washaway, though modern writings describe them as fleurs-de-lys.

 

The examples suggest that this origin for the expression is the correct one,
though some doubt must remain. 

 

The hook of the idiom may have been just a bit of wood or metal but might
equally have been a tool with a sharpened edge, allied to the billhook or
reap hook of more modern agricultural practice. We now connect crook
principally with shepherds and bishops, but in medieval times it was any
hooked device or implement. This meant that hook and crook were synonyms as
well as rhymes, which made it almost inevitable that they were put together
to make a reduplicated rhyming phrase.

 

 

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What is the largest fruit crop on earth?

A: Grapes, followed by bananas.

 

The peanut isn't a nut. What is it?

A: A legume-- a member of the pea family.

 

Where were the first frankfurters sold in the United States?

A: At Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York, in 1871. They were made by
Charles Feltmann, a butcher from Frankfurt, Germany.

 

Wild rice isn't rice. What is it?

A: A coarse, annual grass native to shallow, marshy lakes and streams.

 

What food product was discovered because of a long camel ride?

A: Cottage cheese. An Arab trader found that milk he was carrying in a
goatskin bag had turned into tasty solid white curds.

 

With whom did the shallow champagne glass originate?

A: With Marie Antoinette, from wax molds made of her breasts.

 

Who introduced table knives in the seventeenth century?

A: Cardinal Richelieu. Daggers were in fashion at the dinner table until he
became disgusted with their use as toothpicks and ordered knives with
rounded ends.